Delay between midi keyboard and output sound

[ZeuZ]

Hello everyone. Another latency issue thread

I have just brought a new high spec laptop, a Novatech X50 MV Pro, as the novatech site gave me the option of adding a Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio Notebook Sound Card for £50 quid extra. Of course, not everything went to plan, and I soon discovered that my laptop does not have a socket that fits this sound card (it had a 32 express card socket, not an ExpressCard/54 slot). So the refunds on the way, and they appologised.

Now, they said that the built in sound card should be more than capable for basic level music production type jobs. But I have really bad latency. Its about a quarter of a second delay, from what I can hear, and makes fluent playing impossible. I am using SX3 in Vista with a Radium-61 Midi keyboard, and using the ASIO4ALL driver (which gives by far the best latency times over the other asio ones). In Cubase devices setup it says that I only have 15.601 ms input and output latency, which seems far less than I hear when I'm playing.

So I dont have a clue whats wrong. It could be the sound card (I dont know what it is, all I can see is that its a built in one using Realtek High Definition Audio Driver V 6.0.1.5672), it could be my settings in cubase, or something else. Advise on how to find out what sound card is in my laptop would be a good start, until I get a new decent one. Thanks in Advance.

[topten]

An audio driver is different to a midi driver.

Have you installed the latest M-Audio MIDI driver for Vista?

[ZeuZ]

An audio driver is different to a midi driver.

Ah. Yes. That does make sense. This is why I posted this in the Newbie section

Have you installed the latest M-Audio MIDI driver for Vista?

Yes I think so. I downloaded the one from the M-audio website, I chose the options: keyboard series > radium61 > vista 32- bit, which seems correct for all my equiptment. It came up with:

Product: Radium61
Date: 12/31/2007
Version: 4.3.00
File Name: MA_CMIDI_V32_4.3.00.exe

It seems to work, I mean I can play music and input it in with my midi keyboard, just the delay between playing the note and the sound coming out is annoying. It is a very small gap, but very noticeable if your trying to play complex stuff, and it throws you right off.

Cubase says latency input and output is 16.2 ms in the device mamanger tab. Is this most likely the delay i'm hearing? I thought that 16 ms would be un-noticeable and it would be something else causing delay, but maybe I'm mistaken with this...

[topten]

What size is the ASIO4ALL buffer?
If it is the default 256, try reducing this to 128. A smaller buffer should mean lower audio latency.

In the past there were issues with some m-audio usb midi drivers being slower than they ought to be.
Although, I would have thought that those problems would have been fixed by now.

[Ed_J90]

just a silly thing are you sure cubase is using the asio driver? and not still looking directly at the card this can happen.....

just triple check cubase is using the asio driver and drop the buffer size down on asio4all and match it within cubase....

[Martin Walker]

It doesn't help that Steinberg include the word 'ASIO' in all the driver entries - even 'ASIO Multimedia' (that typically has a 1/2 second latency) and 'ASIO DirectX' (which is better, but still nowhere near the low latency performance of a typical true ASIO driver).

However, if Cubase declares both input and output latency at around 15mS then I think ZeuZ must have chosen the correct driver.

Martin

[ZeuZ]

Thanks for all the suggestions peeps. The latency is now right down to 7ms ( I think that came from reducing the ASIO 4 ALL driver from 512 to 128 ) but, i've another problem now, cubase doesn't seem to be able to recognise my midi keyboard all of a sudden. The option in the input box that usualy there saying "USB keyboard" has vanished, and no levels show anything when I play. Also its stopped playing midi audio full stop, the levels go up when the pointer goes over a note, but no sound comes out. I dont think its likely a cubase issue though, as yesterday my computer froze whenever I played a media file that had audio on it, even video files with audio (but not ones without an audio track) so I think its a more likely sound card (driver) compatability issue or something. I dont have this freezing problem today, but most of cubase seems to be playing up instead. So I dont know if the latency issues solved or not yet

Looks like everythings gone bust overnight.

I'm taking my system into my local music shop in southampton tomorrow (digital village), they should know what to do, they're usually really helpful. I'll post what the issue was if I can resolve it. Thanks for your help here anyways, got me a few steps in the right direction.

[ZeuZ]

I wonder how i managed to get a smiley on the topic of my post instead of the book symbol most people have? I didn't intent to. Its pretty neat though. Makes it stand out. heh.

[ZeuZ]

Nearly forgot about this thread...

I fixed it, it was a sound card issue. These built in laptop sound cards just aren't good enough to cope with music production. I got a Tascam US-122L that plugs in via usb, and the latency vanished for all the synths. I still get latency with the 'microsoft GS wavetable' instruments for some reason, but I aint gonna be needing them anymore. They sound like a strangled cat compared to the legacy cell through the Tascam. And the other synths that came with the tascam are good aswell. Thanks for your help.

I do have another query though. Of course.

I want to create drum and bass, and although a lot of the synths I have are awesome, I cant really find one with good drum beat sounds, or a really powerful bass type sound used so often in this genre. What would the pro's use for this? I especially want to create music that sounds like High Contrasts style (for example this song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffXbJKD1YTA), strong beat, deep booming bass, fast hi-hats, etc.

Currently I'm using SX3, with the drum kit that came with the Tascam, called LM-7, and using the midi drum editor in cubase.

Now, I'm not sure if:

1) The pro's create all their drum beats via synths by entering every beat individually through the midi drum editor in cubase

2) Often use midi beats from a large selection of premade midi files in a pack

3) Just loop already existing audio tracks of drum beats

4) Use standard midi synths for the beats and then edit and fine tune the audio waveform with various effects

5) Use specialist drum synths/software

5) A combination of the above

If someone could point me in the right direction that would be great, coz at the mo my drum beats and bass really isn't sounding too impressive

[Hol]

All of the above mate. Except probably for option 1, which I think is fairly unlikely, it's far too labour intensive and I just really doubt anyone bothers. Making drums hits with synths and then putting them into a sampler is more common I would have said, even though really most people use a sampler, whether hardware or software, or an actual hardware drum machine, or all of the above.

However, LM-7 is the pits, shockingly, shockingly bad. Probably some audio wizards can get amazing drums out of it but lord.....very thin sounding.

The ones that come up all the time are Battery 3, Guru, Redrum, Addictive Drums, Drumkit from Hell, EzyDrummer etc. Lots of sampling going on, lots of making your own drum hits with synths (search the SOS archives for some really good tutorials if I recall correctly).

[ZeuZ]

Thanks, I thought it might not be a simple solution. Looks like I've got some time to put in to get the best sound I'll check the archives.